A Father Reflects on the Death of His Son – How Holy Saturday Speaks to Great Loss
Posted by Ron Sauder on
Holy Saturday is often the overlooked part of the liturgical calendar. Good Friday drapes the faithful in black, Easter Sunday dazzles them awake with sunrise and the empty tomb. But in between, throughout the long Holy Saturday, comes the agony of living with the reality of death.
In his new book, Holy Saturday: A Memoir of Loss and Hope, author and Episcopal layman Gary S. Hauk claims that painful metaphor for the heart-rending loss of his son, Thomas. At the age of 16, Thomas died from complications of Addison’s disease. One ordinary evening in July 2002, Thomas went to bed, fell into an unusually deep sleep, and never awakened, dying after a coma of nearly seven weeks.
During those terrible weeks, a remarkable community coalesced around Thomas’s family, sustaining them with visits, messages, and prayers, while doctors and nurses fought a losing battle to save the boy.
“Holy Saturday is the nightmare when nothing else has presented itself as good news to replace the future-facing hope and expectation that have died. It is the period when we are left to figure out what to do after we have descended into hell and have wondered whether we can climb back out,” Hauk writes.
He adds, “This is my attempt to articulate reason and faith in the face of apparent meaninglessness, with the hope that others, too, will find something here to justify purpose and faith.
“The Book of Common Prayer asserts that ‘in the midst of life we are in death.’ But here is an alternative thought: The community that gathered around Thomas Hauk that summer so long ago became relentless in its affirmation that—to reverse the prayer book’s way of putting it—‘in the midst of death we are in life.’
“Even as brokenhearted friends and family members mourned the dying that they could see was inevitable, they marveled at the inexplicable beauty woven into that time.”
Gary Hauk is an active parishioner of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross in the Diocese of Atlanta, where he is a lay preacher and serves on the vestry. Gary earned his PhD in religion from Emory University, where he has taught Christian ethics and serves as senior editorial adviser at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion.
In a thirty-five-year career at Emory University, he worked with four presidents as vice president and secretary of the University and later as deputy to the president. In 2015, after serving as the unofficial historian of Emory for many years, he was named the first official historian of the University.
In addition to his doctorate in religion, he holds BA and MA degrees in English from Lehigh University and a divinity degree from the Methodist Theological School in Ohio.
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